


To the Stars

by MrProphet



Category: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 03:53:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10689225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	To the Stars

The  _Unity_  was humanity’s crowning achievement, the pinnacle of technological, industrial and scientific development. It had taken almost thirty years from the inauguration of the project to completion of construction in geostationary orbit. It was the first interstellar vessel ever built, and the project had encompassed every major government, industry and interest group on the planet. International cooperation on an unprecedented level had been combined with a vast pool of academic and engineering brilliance to produce a craft that was functional, beautiful, and – most importantly for the politicians who had motivated the whole thing – carbon neutral.  
  
The bridge crew for the launch had been chosen with painstaking care. The twenty-eight men and women (fourteen of each) encompassed twenty-eight nationalities and no two had exactly the same identifiable ethnic origin. Stood in the wrong order – and they were not – they looked like a weird spectrum diagram of skin tone, hair and eye colour. Moreover, they were all superbly well-qualified, with multiple degrees, a battery of technical skills and ten years of physical and social training to achieve the pinnacle of human fitness and media awareness.  
  
Within an hour of the announcement, the Unity Council’s selection had been criticised for including no-one old, fat, ugly stupid or incompetent, which was perhaps the point at which the Council’s mighty PR machine gave in and started sobbing.  
  
After that, there was the question of the captaincy. The mission commander had been chosen based on ability, rather than any national, racial or sexual characteristics; that the best person for the job turned out to be a heterosexual white male from Virginia was pure misfortune.  
  
The primary mission engineers were the first line of defence against malfunction aboard the ship. After the bridge crew farrago, the engineering section were wheeled out – in several cases literally; weightlessness had not been kind to them – whereupon accusations of tokenism flew in, alongside a flurry of complaints that airtime was being taken up by these ‘fat, unsanitary hermaphrodites’ and ‘why can’t we see more of the bridge crew; they’re well fit.’  
  
It was at that point that a popular magazine decided that the booster rockets were ‘blatantly phallic’, while a tabloid newspaper in London complained of the vulgarity of a reactor coolant housing that looked like a nipple. The entire PR team for the project promptly resigned.  
  
Without professional advice, the scientific team proceeded to alienate the public with hours of rambling commentary on the nature of the science involved. This misguided attempt to ‘educate’ was clamped down on by the project’s security backers, leading to immediate accusations of ‘a sinister military agenda’ to the project.  
  
The President of the USA and the Russian Premier appealed for calm and unity, at which point the French and Chinese accused them of trying to dominate the programme. Nineteen governments immediately launched official protests over the lists of colonists and thirteen attempts at sabotage were launched in the next week alone, one of them collapsing the Kourou ascender and devastating much of Guiana.  
  
The newly-elected Pope then declared the mission to fly in the face of God, and an unfortunate rejoinder regarding the location of the divine visage caused the loss of one-hundred and nineteen Christian crew members and a fair number of Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and even Buddhist crew walked out in sympathy.  
  
The decision was made to launch the mission ahead of schedule, while any crew at all remained.  
  
_Unity_  launched in 2103 with approximately 83% of her optimum complement. By the time she lost contact with Earth, no-one really cared any more.


End file.
